Hi folks! As I have had many emails and comments from you guys since I started my blog in September, I thought it only right to do an “About me” page. I’m Peter Marsden. I live in northern England.
My relationship with the forex market has been a very rocky one from day one. I began my journey in early 2004 as I had wanted a long term investment. Initially I went to see the financial advisors at my local high street bank, but was unimpressed by their offerings. Mostly they tried to sell mutual funds, many of them failed to even keep up with the sector benchmark and many were negative after several years. Needless to say, this was not especially appealing. After some searching around I came across many forex sites, these interested me immediately and I soon downloaded my first demo platform. Then I bought a few books and read many articles online about support, resistance, trend lines, technical indicators etc etc. I read that over 90% of traders lose money but of course, like most newbies I thought “this is not going to be me”.
At first I used EMA crossovers as my strategy on small time frames, it works quite well at first, but I would get bored when I had no signals and try to make trades when they did not exist. A major mistake as it often lead to bad entries and chasing the market. After around 3 months of demo trading I could not make money consistantly as I was not disciplined enough. I ended up giving up.
Towards the end of 2004, I could not resist having another crack at forex. A major passion for this market soon developed. I had remembered everything I had learnt from my “first phase”. I stuck with a similar moving average strategy and found my discipline levels were much better and I soon began to be able to consistantly break even, after all the spreads. I stayed with demo trading into 2005 working on my entries, exits, profit taking etc. I slowly found I could have a consistent edge in my trading.
In mid 2005, I started trading live. Oh dear. The emotions and impulsive behavior started again. My account was small, but I did lose some of it. It started to play with my head again, and I just had to give it a break.
It was not until early 2006, I resumed trading again and this was on demo, but decided to move onto much bigger time frames, with the thought of it being easier to “stay out” the market when appropriate. I stayed on demo for most of 2006. Remembering everything that had happened the previous time I went live. I started with a very small account and used microlots. This time I found it much easier to trade my strategy with the extreme discipline that was required. I stayed trading a very small balance on bigger time frames for quite long time before I increased it considerably.
We are now coming towards the end of 2007 and for the last few months I have generated fairly consistent returns on my account balance. I still keep risk very low and always to think of the big picture. This helps me avoid any of the emotions and impulsive behavior that really dragged me down initially. At the end of the day one bad day or week is very minor at the end of the year, assuming you stuck with your disciplined trading plan. Nowadays, I am mostly unaffected emotionally by wins or losses and I believe this was perhaps the hardest part to learn.
The reason for creating forexpm.com is to share my experience to new traders, so hopefully they find it easier to avoid all the ones I made.
Happy trading to all,
Peter Marsden
